I shall never send for a priest or recite an Act of Contrition in my last moments. I do not mind if I lose my soul for all eternit...y. If the kind of God exists Who would damn me for not working out a deal with Him, then that is unfortunate. I should not care to spend eternity in the company of such a person.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition. Such intuitions give the appearance of miracul...ous flushes, or short-circuits of reasoning. In fact they may be likened to an immersed chain, of which only the beginning and the end are visible above the surface of consciousness. The diver vanishes at one end of the chain and comes up at the other end, guided by invisible links.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Let our hearts, as subtle masters do,Stir up their servants to an act of rage...And after seem to chide 'em. This shall makeOur purpose necessary, and not envious;Which so appearing to the common eyes,We shall be called purgers, not murderers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

For twelve successive Congresses we have appeared before committees of the two Houses making this plea, that the underlying princi...ple of our Government, the right of consent, shall have practical application to the other half of people. Such a little simple thing we have been asking for a quarter of a century. For over forty years, longer than the children of Israel wandered through the wilderness, we have been begging and praying and pleading for this act of justice. We shall some day be heeded.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Good and evil are essential differences of the act of the will. For good and evil pertain essentially to the will; just as truth a...nd falsehood pertain to the reason, the act of which is distinguished essentially by the difference of truth and falsehood (according as we say that an opinion is true or false.) Consequently, good and evil volition are acts differing in species.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders,... its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it. The fault lies with your mouldy systems, your logic of 2 2 = 4. The fault lies with you, Chancellors, caught in the net of syllogisms. You manufacture engineers, magistrates, doctors, who know nothing of the true mysteries of the body or the cosmic laws of existence. False scholars blind outside this world, philosophers who pretend to reconstruct the mind. The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Painting throughout its history has served many purposes, has been flat and has used perspective, has been framed and has been lef...t borderless, has been explicit and has been mysterious. But one act of faith has remained a constant.... The act of faith consisted in believing that the visible contained hidden secrets, that to study the visible was to learn something more than could be seen in a glance.... Jackson Pollock was driven by a despair which was partly his and partly that of the times which nourished him, to refuse this act of faith: to insist, with all his brilliance as a painter, that there was nothing behind, that there was only that which was done to the canvas on the side facing us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »